In Indian education, imagination is quietly becoming endangered. As institutions chase measurable outcomes, hyper-competitive metrics, and employability scores, the arts, especially theatre, are routinely pushed to the periphery. It is treated as a co-curricular indulgence rather than a serious pedagogical tool. Yet, as an educator who works closely with undergraduate and postgraduate learners, I have witnessed how theatre can open intellectual and emotional capacities that traditional teaching rarely reaches.
Over the past years, my students and I discovered this anew through a series of performance-based explorations integrated into the literature classroom. When they devised a production on the life and letters of John Keats, something remarkable happened: a poet often locked behind the glass case of the Romantic syllabus suddenly stepped into the present. Students who once found Keats inaccessible began to feel the tremors of his longing, the fragility of his illness, and the precision of his imaginative vision. Concepts like negative capability, which are abstract on the page, became experientially understood on stage.
The shift was even more striking during our adaptation of Frankenstein. Instead of engaging with the novel merely as Gothic fiction, students interrogated the scientific ambition and ethical dilemmas at the heart of Mary Shelley's critique. In rehearsal discussions, they grappled with questions that resonate acutely today: Who gets to create life? What counts as monstrosity? How does society manufacture the very outsiders it fears? Their performance became a mirror to contemporary anxieties about AI, genetic engineering, and digital alienation, proving that literature lives most vividly when embodied.
A similar deepening of engagement unfolded in our theatrical reimagining of Saadat Hasan Manto's Toba Tek Singh. On stage, the absurdity and anguish of Partition were no longer historical abstractions but urgent emotional realities. Students found themselves wrestling with questions about nationhood, borders, mental health, and collective trauma. For many, portraying Bishan Singh, a man displaced both geographically and existentially, was the first time they truly grasped how political decisions cut into the fabric of ordinary lives. Theatre made the story not simply something to be studied, but something to be felt.
Other productions ranging from innovative adaptations to original scripts responding to current social issues revealed a consistent truth. The stage is often the first place where students claim their voice. Theatre gives space to those who rarely speak in class, those who doubt their abilities, and those who have been disciplined into silence by exam-centred schooling. It becomes a democratic arena of learning where collaboration is not an afterthought but a necessity.
These experiences align with decades of scholarship in Theatre in Education (TiE), which argues that performance enhances comprehension, empathy, critical thinking, and confidence. It is not about producing actors. It is about producing reflective citizens. When students inhabit a role, even momentarily, they learn to listen, negotiate meanings, and consider perspectives other than their own.
And yet, despite its potential, TiE remains marginal in Indian schools and universities. Drama is reduced to an annual day event, teachers rarely receive training in theatre pedagogy, and timetables leave little room for processes that require patience and creativity. The National Education Policy (2020) acknowledges the value of arts-integrated learning, but implementation remains uneven and often symbolic.
If we truly hope to prepare students for a world that demands adaptability, collaboration, and ethical reasoning, theatre cannot remain an accessory. It must be structurally embedded into curricula, not as a one-off workshop, but as a mode of inquiry. A history class can stage debates between nationalist thinkers; a political science class can explore rights and citizenship through street theatre; a psychology class can dramatise case studies to understand behaviour and empathy; a law programme can simulate courtroom trials to unpack justice and ethics; management students can use role play to practise negotiation and leadership; even engineering cohorts can prototype solutions through design-based performance and collaborative problem-solving. These are not expensive innovations. They require willingness, not lavish budgets.
Theatre reminds us that learning is not merely cognitive. It is embodied, social, and affective. It teaches students to hold ambiguity, to listen deeply, and to respond generously. It encourages them to take creative risks and to see knowledge not as static content but as something lived and negotiated.
Equally important is what theatre teaches educators themselves. When teachers shift from being sole authorities to facilitators of collective meaning-making, classrooms transform into shared intellectual spaces. Authority becomes porous and listening becomes pedagogical. In such environments, teachers learn to read silences, energies, and emotional undercurrents alongside written responses and exam scripts. Assessment, too, begins to change from a narrow focus on right answers to a richer attention to process, reflection, and growth.
Theatre thus invites a reimagining of pedagogy itself, urging educators to trust uncertainty, dialogue, and discovery as legitimate modes of learning.It insists on presence, on bodies sharing space, on time that cannot be fast-forwarded. It reminds us that education is, at its core, a relational act. To imagine together is not a luxury, it is a civic skill. When students learn to imagine lives unlike their own, futures not yet written, and solutions beyond prescribed templates, they are being prepared not just for jobs, but for participation in a fragile, plural world.
As an educator, I have watched hesitant students become articulate thinkers, shy learners become confident collaborators, and disengaged classrooms come alive through performance. The stage does not distract from learning; it intensifies it. If India wants classrooms capable of producing thoughtful, empathetic, and resilient citizens, then theatre must move from the margins to the centre of education. The future of learning lies not just in digital platforms and skill training modules, but in the oldest human technology we possess: the ability to imagine together.
(The author is Academic Coordinator, Department of English and Cultural Studies, CHRIST (Deemed to be University, Delhi NCR). She teaches “Reading Drama” to undergraduate students and “Theatre and Performance” to postgraduate students.)